Cybill Shepherd: “. . . a name I’d hated and heard mispronounced all my life, was known to Michelangelo (albeit with the spelling tweaked).”

Linda Rosenkrantz & Pamela Redmond Sataran: “The ancient Greeks used this as a genetic word to represent prophetesses—women who relayed the messages of the gods. It now has a rather . . . unfashionable image, despite the blonde gloss of the uniquely spelled Cybill Shepherd.”

Cybill Shepherd: “People . . . acted as if my brain was blonde and watched rather than listened when I spoke, as if wondering where the ventriloquist’s hand went.”

Cybill Shepherd: “And there were lots of us. In Roman mythology, the guide informed me, Cybele was . . . called the Great Mother of the Gods . . . a temple in her honor was erected on the site now occupied by the Vatican . . . Sibyls were named for her, and their oracles . . . guided imperial policy . . .”

Walter Stephens: “The Sybils . . . according to certain fathers of the Church . . . were divinely inspired to predict the coming of Christ and describe his true divinity.”

Brian W. Breed: “The Sibyl’s . . . procedure . . . is to leave her prophecy written on leaves to be read in her absence . . . confined to text, the Sibyl’s prophecies are liable to become disrupted and disordered.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I got involved in the editing . . . I like it when I hear this process called ‘montage.’ It seems to convey . . . that the whole will add up to . . . more than the sum of its parts.”

Carolyn Alessio: “The book brims with inconsistencies . . . perhaps the more apt title would have alluded to Sybil, the film about a schizophrenic with manifold personalities . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “I’m used to that actually—I’ve been mistaken for other people for a mighty long time.”

Debbie Nathan: “Sybil, the blockbuster book . . . about the woman with sixteen personalities . . . was moving off the shelves as briskly as the Bible . . . it had sold over six million copies . . . worldwide. A television adaptation was . . . seen . . . by a fifth of the American population . . .”

Debbie Nathan: “The book is still in print and the TV drama has become a classic. Both versions were instrumental in creating a new psychiatric diagnosis: multiple personality disorder, or MPD . . . Sybil also created a new way for millions of people . . . to think about their memories, their families, and their capabilities . . .”

Debbie Nathan: “Why . . .when Sybil was first published, had so many millions . . . fervidly embraced as truth a story whose mythic qualities should have immediately made us skeptical? How had we been so naïve?”

Ahban Azer: “. . . in love with myths, he and Cybill were attracted to each other for all the wrong reasons.”

Cybill Shepherd: “His luminous olive skin glowed with what I later learned was bronzing makeup.”

Debbie Nathan: “Some commentators . . . argue about whether MPD was real or a hoax . . . more useful . . . was to recognize that the feeling of being inhabited by other selves has very deep roots in our culture and history.”

Bill Jensen: “Elvis himself said his favorite Elvis impersonator was Kaufman. But he was more than Elvis.”

Cybill Shepherd: “Word that Elvis had entered the building . . . filtered into the lobby like a game of whispering down the lane . . . everybody in the row to my
right . . . moved one seat over.”

Peggy Lipton: “’Elvis would like to talk to you,’ Joe
said . . . I finally picked up.”

Debbie Nathan: “Searching for a sense of integration, women took up multiple personality disorder as a metaphor, thanks entirely to Sybil.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “Sybil’s personality, she said, had a rainbow edge as if a little out of focus. She said that had I known Sybil better I would have . . . understood how Sybil-like was the aura of minor events which, in spells, had suffused her . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “The house was luxurious in a rental sort of way, sprawling and devoid of personal taste. Everything had a metallic glow.”

Hugh Kenner: “She is the prophetic power, no longer consulted by heroes but tormented by curious boys . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . for once I was chattering away rather than deferring to the conversation of others . . . Brando . . . looked at me . . . ‘If this girl doesn’t shut up,’ he said to no one in particular . . .’”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . the woman who became Sybil fell in with a psychiatrist and a journalist, and the three saw their project . . . burst upon the world with perfect timing. They were a blessed sisterhood . . .”

David Letterman: “We’ve had all of the great quarterbacks . . . then the night you were on, and Joe, and myself . . . pretty good luck . . . three of us at once . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “I was a little excited.”

Jason Hartley: “Brando is the third of the Three Fat Men of Advancement, along with Elvis and Orson Welles.”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . I found the records of their enterprise . . . They named it Sybil Incorporated . . . the contract they signed designated a three-way split of all profits and spin-offs from their book, including Sybil movies, Sybil board games, Sybil tee shirts, Sybil dolls, and a Sybil musical.”

Cybill Shepherd: “I’d given my name and much of my identity to the series . . .”

Dave Gelly: “Nobody Else But Me . . . recorded in a single day . . . is a beautiful piece . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . the character was set to die . . . I declined, thinking surely I could do better than death on a toilet seat . . . my acting career was stalled . . .”

Whitney Balliett: “Getz became a romantic, an idol, a kind of . . . Elvis Presley.”

Cybill Shepherd: “With great qualms, I . . . invade another medium . . . record an album of standards . . .”

Sophia Papaioannou: “Here the Sibyl declares that when her corporeal life span reaches an end she will survive in her voice.”

Dave Gelly: “. . . on Cybill Shepherd’s Mad About the Boy, he sounds as though he is thinking about something else . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . when I declined, he snarled, ‘It’s your fault if I go back to being a junkie . . .’ ignoring me for the rest of the session.”

Peggy Lipton: “For that moment, Elvis had made an effort to communicate . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘Well, that’s it for us,’ he said. Those were his last words to me.”

Debbie Nathan: “Sybil was a hit, wrote the . . . Post. . . because her multiple personality disorder mirrored ‘the contemporary stereotypes that people . . . apply to themselves . . . as disparate assemblages of roles, without any reigning self.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “With the barest trace of good night, Elvis pulled away and proceeded right through a stop sign . . .”

Charles S. Peirce: “If we suppose ourselves to know no more of man than what is contained in the definition Man is the rational animal. . . we might divide man into man-risable and man non-risable . . .”

Debbie Nathan: “Teenagers were instructed to ‘Write a discussion in dialogue form between two or more sides of your personality. Name them as Sybil named her Selves. Try to indicate why you are more “together” than Sybil.’”

Julia Kristeva: “We might say . . . the image of the Sibyl is that of the infinitization of discourse, the figuralization of the word . . . liberated from its dependence on the symbol . . . enjoying the ‘arbitrariness’ of the sign. Belonging to this and not the other world, the Sibyl speaks all languages . . . reunites improbable elements both in and through the word.”

David Letterman: “. . . I don’t even know what it means, do you exactly?”

T. S. Eliot: “. . . the mutual implication of its several purposes gives us a feeling of an identity of the word. . . similar to the feeling I have professed to have of identity among the several uses of the word runcible.”

Debbie Nathan: “Sybil, with her brilliant and traumatized multiplicity, became . . . a language of our conflict, our idiom of distress.”

Miss Lollobrigida: “I think is all so complicated, the English writing, because the. . . language is so rich.”

Hannah Sullivan: “. . . Eliot originally chose the famous passage from Conrad’s novel . . . ending ‘The horror! The horror!’ . . . In the epigraph from the Satyricon, the character . . . reports in Greek the words spoken to the Sibyl hanging in a cage. . . ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’—and her reply—‘I want to die.’”

Brent Marchant: “. . . a brash, inventive young filmmaker named Orson Welles attempted to make a movie version . . . perceived logistical problems killed the project in preproduction.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . I had died before—cacophonous, public, psychically bloody deaths. . . at the box office and at the hands of critics—but this demise was singularly painful.”

Gene M. Moore: “Welles’ plan was to keep the camera ‘constantly in the place of the hero, showing us things as they appear to him, without ever being allowed to see him except when he looks at himself in a mirror.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . .to devour the classics, to live inside them: in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, I learned the tragic bargains people make for eternal youth

and beauty.”

Rick Reilly: “They probably said the same thing to Cheryl Tiegs that they did to Joe Namath . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “Orson . . . had given me the novella . . . ‘Henry James wrote this for you,’ he said . . . ”

Henry James: “I have seen no other foreigners of distinction except Charles Peirce.”

Stephen C. Meyer: “So subsumed is Gina Lollobrigida’s character . . . in this foreign identity that she is never given a proper name: she remains ‘the Queen of Sheba’ . . . throughout the film.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘What are all those?’ I asked, looking at the slabs of marble, the various tints and typefaces.

‘Those are your choices,’ he said cheerfully.”

Charles S. Peirce: “. . . the connotation of man would be less than that of either man-risable or man non-risable . . . conversely man-risable and man non-risable would have a less extension than man.”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘You know,’ said Orson, looking up at the inspirational images, ‘there was a time when God was a woman.’”

Debbie Nathan: “. . . the last alter to yield was ‘The Blonde.’”

Anonymous: “Welles. . .was also reportedly quoted as saying that he thought Fellini’s Satyricon was ‘frightened in the crib by Vogue magazine.’”

Cybill Shepherd: “I know how pretentious and melodramatic this sounds, but . . . There seemed to be a personal message in the chapel for me . . . ”

Carlos Santana: “You can become . . . famous like Joe Namath . . . Elvis . . . if you are not into spiritual principles, you become a caricature of yourself real quick.”

Hugh Kenner: “. . . Fame is a speaking, hence a breath . . .”

Dave Gelly: . . . “the version of ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing’ with which the Shrine concert ends . . . is more like a celebration.”

Cybill Shepherd: “. . . the existence of a female deity before the time of Christ symbolized the limitless power and potential achievement of women . . . I believe in both, and the Sibyls were a little calling card from the divine.”

Vladimir Nabokov: “This of course might have been mistaken for the work of the wind, and Sybil hated the wind.”

Tom Robbins: “Lipton’s memoir, Breathing Out, was published . . .”

Cybill Shepherd: “I told him I knew about Cybele from the Sistine Chapel . . . he suggested I read The Greek Myths by Robert Graves . . . Reading that book cover to cover intensified my spiritual quest to learn more about the so-called Great Goddess.”

Debbie Nathan: “A . . . Times reviewer wrote that the book made him ‘uncomfortable from beginning to end,’ giving him feelings of ‘nagging embarrassment

and ultimately of anger . . .’”

Mr. Graves: “I must tell you, Gina . . . I was bouleverse . . . that you agreed to be my interlocutrix, I think the word is . . . I get an understanding of what different actresses represent . . . I don’t want to . . . mention names . . . ”

Cybill Shepherd: “‘How do you spell your name?’ the mortician kept asking, eventually recognizing this as a photo op and requesting that I pose in front of a display